


Chelsey Barton- The Amazing Hawkeye

by worddancer



Series: Avenge Revenge [4]
Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Deaf Character, Deaf Clint Barton, F/F, Rule 63, circus freak clint, clint collects strays, comic book clint barton, gender bend, gender swap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 06:55:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16258985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worddancer/pseuds/worddancer
Summary: “Wanna get coffee? I got an idea you might like. We can always do our best to kill each other after. Just look at me when you talk- I’m deaf so I can’t read your lips if you’re turned away.”Natalia was like a feral cat, Chelsey knew how to take care of feral animals. She grew up in the circus until she wasn’t useful to them anymore. She found a spot in SHIELD and knew too many secrets to ever be useless to them. Nikki gave her enough rope it tasted like freedom and Phil was a good man in a dirty business.There was always room for one more stray.





	Chelsey Barton- The Amazing Hawkeye

**Author's Note:**

> I kept my female verson of Clint Barton closer to the comics but a little darker. She's still a human disaster but I didn't show that as much as I would have liked here. I wanted to get into the woman who was a circus preformer who became a killer. I might come back and tinker with this one some more or do a different Chelsey Barton one down the road. who knows.

Chelsey Barton was used to people staring at her. The Amazing Hawkeye! Look at her shoot deadly weapons with a tiny skirt and deadly smile! Look at the pretty girl and her amazing tricks!

 

Still a few broken noses and a few broken cheek bones from fights behind the tent when the damn rubes tried to grab her or the tightrope walkers and suddenly her pretty face wasn’t so pretty.

 

Years and years later Chelsey and Stacy bonded over the fact that no matter how good you were being pretty mattered. Chelsey had been pretty, and Stacy hadn’t been. Now Chelsey looked like five miles of bad road and had the scars to prove it. She preferred it that way. She’d been stared at most of her life, now she made a living hiding in the shadows.

 

Trick shooting was always a good circus gig but if you were a girl you had to be pretty and look good doing it.

 

The ringmaster said she had a few weeks to figure out another act or move on.

 

Barney said he had a good score and they could use her gymnastics skills.

 

She told them both to fuck off and walked away. She was tired of people only wanting her for one of her skill sets.

 

She learned damn quick in this world that’s all someone wants. You just have to choose who to get in bed with. Military seemed like a good idea as any. Why not, she had a deadly aim with anything and there’s always a business for that.

 

Turns out the army doesn’t like female snipers no matter how pretty they were or weren’t. They were more concerned with the lack of dangly bits between her legs than her near perfect eyes.

 

Turns out a one-eyed woman name Nicole Fury doesn’t give a flying fuck what was or wasn't between her legs and just so happens to have a secret organization that’s hiring good shots with excellent make up skills.

 

Her stage makeup always looked good- being pretty mattered remember?

 

Her first kill is a human trafficker and she doesn’t blink as he bleeds out from an arrow to the gut. Like it or not she wanted to make him hurt, make him suffer. She wanted him to see her as she slit his goddamn throat. She knew what Nikki was doing, giving her easy kills. No moral grey area. This man lives and more girls and kids are raped and sold. More kids have choices stripped from their fingers. One dead man, a hundred plus lives saved. She knew as time went on the line would be less and less clear.

 

As she watched the piece of scum at her feet bleed out she really couldn’t give a damn.

 

She wondered what that made her. She remembered rubes trying to grab her tiny skirt and the tightrope walkers parasol. She decided she didn’t care what she became. She was choosing to be someone’s nightmare.

 

Years later when Tash gave her the single to get out and get out quick seconds before her team turned on her in the middle of Columbia she wondered when killing former teammates became easy. She wondered when she choose to be everyone’s nightmare.

 

She was relieved when a mile in to her hike out of the jungle she started to vomit, the blank stares of people she thought were friends but were in truth fucking Nazis staring back at her in her mind.

 

It wasn’t easy to kill friends yet.

 

Yet.

 

Chelsey remembered being closer to thirty than the fifty she was edging toward now and seeing a girl with red in her hair and death in her eyes. Former Red Room, a very expensive gun for hire, beautiful and already looking to complete a death wish. From the information they had she was in her twenties, 14 years younger than Chelsey herself.

 

“I’m making a call Phil.” Chelsey said into her comm. She took out the ear bud and smashed it under her foot.

 

“Wanna get coffee? I got an idea you might like. We can always do our best to kill each other after. Just look at me when you talk- I’m deaf so I can’t read your lips if you’re turned away.”

 

Natalia was like a feral cat, Chelsey knew how to take care of feral animals. She grew up in the circus until she wasn’t useful to them anymore. She found a spot in SHIELD and knew too many secrets to ever be useless to them. Nikki gave her enough rope it tasted like freedom and Phil was a good man in a dirty business.

 

There was always room for one more stray.

 

By the time Chelsey picked up Natalia (she wasn’t Natasha yet but she was on her way) the older woman had been with SHIELD for over a decade. She’d managed to chase off as many handlers in half as many years.

 

Then there was an explosion. Then her latest fuck wad of a handler didn’t give her all the information because it “wasn’t her job to know everything- just what she needed to know for the mission.” Fucking Sitwell. Then she was knocked out and woke up in a SHIELD med bay with 90% hearing loss.

 

She couldn’t even really scream at Nikki because her vocal cords were all fucked up from what ever smoke they used in the bombs. Plus she couldn’t hear herself speak and that honestly freaked her out a bit.

 

Nikki offered Chelsey a retirement package by writing it on a white board and got a middle finger for her efforts.

 

Nikki smiled like she knew that was how Chelsey would react and swiped her offer off the white board and began to write again.

 

“I expect you on your feet in 6 months, I’ll have a handler and comm system for you by then.”

 

Chelsey flipped the controlling bitch the bird and a thank you. True to Nikki’s word R and D worked up some coms that let her hear whatever her handler was trying to tell her. She learned sign language as quickly as she learned other languages and learned to read lips. The coms could work as hearing aids but frankly not very well. They weren’t all that good at picking up things outside her ears.

 

At the end of the day 90% hearing loss was 90% hearing loss. For the first year after the explosion agents she'd worked with for years seemed to think she was going to throw her hands up and quit. Chelsey stared right back at them and dared them to say something to her face.

 

Nikki also gave her Phil.

 

Phil who made lesser agents tremble in fear at the mention of his name. Phil who perfected the art of bland interest when he was in high school. Phil who was a snarky sarcastic little shit in a suit if you knew where to look for it.

 

Phil who worked with her and didn’t try to hold information from her. Phil who planned missions with her and didn’t try to brow beat her. He didn't talk down to her and he made sure she had every scrap of information he had when they planned her missions together.

 

See here’s the thing- Chelsey was really fucking smart.

 

Those shots she made? Those took calculations. Some how none of her other handlers had managed to figure that out. Sure there were rumors about her eyes. That she might be a bit more than human ect. Sure she liked to hide in the ceiling vents. Sure she was tired of always being someone’s nightmare out in the field and liked to play pranks when she was on base.

 

It was amazing, even after SHIELD agents figured out she used the vents as her own personal highway they never managed to stop and think someone might be listening. After she went deaf they seemed to forget she didn't need to be in hearing distance to read their lips.

 

Chelsey was always the first one to learn the good gossip.

 

After the mission with Sitwell that cost her her hearing she hid in the vents above his desk and slowly leaked glitter down over him. Bright pink glitter, every damn day for weeks on end. The bastard deserved more but she promised Nikki she wouldn't do more. She also salted his coffee every morning and a few other petty tricks she learned from Barney.

 

Here she wasn’t someone’s nightmare even when she wanted to be.

 

Five years later she still refused to wear coms or hearing aids if she wasn't on a mission. Nikki always talked to her face, Phil could sign better than she could and everyone else could go fuck themselves.

 

Then she brought in Natalia. Natalia who was almost Natasha, who was a feral cat, who was so so young to have that deep a death wish. Chelsey wondered how long it wouldn't have taken her to have that same look if she hadn't started working with Phil.

 

“Careful for the Hawk.” Smugglers whispered to each other as they passed drugs, guys, children, people over boarders. Hawkeye was a nightmare to them.

 

Chelsey thought of the grey missions Nikki sent her on. She thought of the times when she couldn't sleep after getting home. She thought about the damn apartment building in Bed Stuey she'd bought and kept fixing up little by little. She thought about wandering the streets of New York when SHIELD didn't have a job for her and beating up muggers and domestic disturbances. So what if sometimes she beat a rapist a little too much. Was there a too much?

 

She thought of the missions she read and told Nikki no.

 

She wondered if Natalia, if the Black Widow had ever been allowed to say no.

 

Chelsey took the com out of her ear and told Phil she was making an audible. Phil was spitting mad she turned up three days later with a black eye and a red haired girl barely in her mid twenties. He also already had several different outfits in different styles for the new stray to choose from. She wasn't ready to make that choice yet- Natalia wasn't Natasha yet. Natalia wasn't sure how to make choices yet. She learned quickly though.

 

For the first three years of being at SHIELD Natasha lived with Chelsey. After the first year- once Natalia was Natasha- they fucked for the last two. They fucked hard, fast, rough and often left bruises on each other. Both knew it wouldn't last forever.

 

Both were surprised it lasted as long as it did.

 

One morning they woke up after some of the best sex they'd had and looked at each other and knew it was over. That week Chelsey helped Natasha find her own place. By the end of the month Natasha still had a drawer at Chelsey's place and Chelsey's favorite baggy sweats never seemed to leave Natasha's new place.

 

Chelsey still had her apartment in Bed Stuey and Natasha had a penthouse in Manhattan.

 

They still went on missions together. Strike Team Delta- a Russian spy, a circus freak and a man who wore professionalism like the other agents wore their guns. There wasn't a single place they couldn't get into. There wasn't a single target they couldn't eliminate.

 

They sometimes did solo missions. Chelsey in New Mexico and Natasha with Stark.

 

The Tesseract happened. The Avengers happened. Loki happened.

 

Loki happened.

 

Loki fucking happened.

 

Cognitive recalibration her ass. Natasha wacked her upside the head and it broke the bond between her and the staff long enough she got her brain back. There were fucking aliens in New York and she had a fucking bow and arrow with a few arrows that exploded.

 

Somehow they fucking won but god she didn't know what to do.

 

Phil was dead.

 

She went dark for a week. She would have gone dark longer, but Natasha found her and dragged her out of the Super 8 she had holed herself up in somewhere in Nebraska. Natasha forced her into a fridged shower and proceeded to dump every ounce of whiskey left into the motel room.

 

There wasn't much left.

 

Natasha swore at her in Russian and Chelsey was too tired to even bother trying to respond. Once she stumbled out of the shower wrapped in a scratchy hotel towel she sat on the bed next to Natasha. A half hour passed before Chelsey broke. She cried until her entire body shook with gasping sobs.

 

Natasha wrapped an arm around her shoulders and let her friend break against her.

 

A year later they found out that Phil survived- barely. It took him a year to recover enough to be sure he would survive.

 

Another year after that SHIELD fell and Chelsey killed her team in a South American jungle. It took her three months to get back to New York and back to the Tower.

 

If SHIELD had gone to shit she figured Toni was her best shot. Of course it turned out Toni had a shit ton of PTSD issues that surprised no one and came damn close to building a robot army. They ended up in Sorkovia and found more HYDRA ass holes and two kids who had been experimented on.

 

Chelsey was getting really fucking tired of finding people who never had the choice to say no. She was getting really really tired of seeing death wishes in people too young to know what a death wish was.

 

There were two teens, twins. One could move things with her mind and one could run faster than a blur.

 

There were two kids and they were scared.

 

There were two kids and they were pretty and soon one of the fucking HYDRA scientists who put Mengele to shame was going to notice.

 

There were two kids who deserved to learn how to say no.

 

There was always room for two more strays.


End file.
